Before We Go Extinct

by Karen Rivers

  And suddenly, instantly, I am drowning. I am de-finned and sinking all the way to the bottom. I see stars. I am going to pass out and I am going to … and then suddenly my throat opens. I gulp in air, thirsty. She stares at me. “You okay?” she says. “It’s just—I’m sorry. I’m late. I have to—well, I have to go. I can’t get fired. Not now. Sh—I mean, sugar. I’m so late. Sharky, I cannot be late.”

  Her temper starts bubbling up. Mom has some issues with anger.

  “I HAVE TO GO,” she shouts, as though I’m the one who has been keeping her here.

  I shrug and listen to my pulse pick up speed and start galloping. When I was a kid and this happened, I used to faint. Mom would get mad about spilled milk or how I took too long to put on my shoes and I’d fade out to the tune of the horse hooves of my heart, cantering. I went to therapy.

  Now I just listen to her and pretend her voice is waves, pouring over me. I’m a rock. I’m a reef. I’m the land.

  I acknowledge that her anger isn’t anything to do with me.

  I keep breathing.

  Stay in the moment.

  “ARGH,” she yells. “I’M SORRY, OKAY? I don’t know why I’m so mad!”

  I nod. I know she doesn’t.

  “Anyway,” she says. “He’s your father, okay? You can live with him for a couple of months. He’s your dad.”

  But I hate him, is what I’d say if I talked.

  No, I can’t.

  No way.

  Not him.

  No.

  Please.

  What about Daff?

  I don’t say anything. I flip my phone in my hand over and over and over. The sun shines on the screen and makes it a mirror. I stumble to the table and sit.

  Mom pushes her chair back, gets up.

  She walks away.

  She says, “I’m sorry, sweetie. You know I love you. I hope I don’t miss the bus because then I’ll miss the stupid train again—I…”

  I hear her pick up her keys, but I don’t turn around.

  I hear her fast-walking down the hall.

  I flip my phone.

  And just like that, it buzzes.

  Daff. If u wrnt there, u wldn’t ansr, jrkfce.

  Daff has a vowel problem. Vowels have a Daff problem.

  Non, I type. Au revoir. Je ne regrette rien. Je regrette tout.

  I can’t even explain to myself why I can’t talk to her. There’s nothing I want more than to talk to her. I love her. I hate her. I can’t. I just can’t.

  The sun comes out and filters through the window, making a patch of shadows on the table that takes the glare off all that yellow. There is a bowl of apples in the middle of the table; they are Mom-level clean, probably bleached. I watch my hand reach out for one and I take it and bite into it and the flesh of it crisps against my teeth. It tastes like school lunches in third grade before anything bad happened. I put it back in the bowl, one bite missing. A bite I can’t seem to swallow. I chew and chew. Tears are looming somewhere behind my eyes, threatening to struggle to the surface. A fly buzzes from over near the sink, settling on the drain board. I raise my hand, like I’m saying goodbye. Goodbye, fly. Goodbye, Mom. Goodbye, New York. Goodbye, The King. Goodbye, Daff. Goodbye goodbye goodbye.

  “You have a few more weeks here,” she’d said as she left the room. “You can get through them. I know it’s hard. I know it’s really so hard. But then it’s summer and…” She’d spread her hands, expanding them as far as she could, like summer will be this thing that is big, big enough to make me forget.

  The King died in the spring.

  I look up at the ceiling. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Bubbles to follow to the surface?

  Or maybe for the light.

  6

  Dear Daff,

  This letter is not in French.

  I’m not going to send it, so don’t worry about what it says or what I think or feel because what does it matter anyway? You should think about the stuff you’re good at thinking about now, like how you look better with your hair frizzed out than if you straighten it with that hot-iron thing. You should think about your jeans, which ones make you look the skinniest. (You aren’t fat. I don’t know why I said that.)

  (I am trying to hurt you, because I’m so angry.)

  (You look beautiful.)

  (You look terrible.)

  That’s what you’re thinking about, right? How to look good on TV?

  You do look good.

  I hate you. (Which is why I sound mean.) I love you. When I said that, I really meant it, not in the way you said it back. Someone should write a book about the difference between I love you and love ya.

  Anyway. You can’t tell someone else how to feel, right? You can’t make them feel what they don’t. You don’t get to decide. Yada yada. We’ve seen the shows. I’m basically the second-place girl who just can’t freakin’ believe that Mr. Overly Made-Up Abs isn’t going to drop to his knees and propose and instead he’s saying, “We had a connection right from the start and you’re beautiful and I can’t believe how lucky I am to know you but…” Everything in the world is contained in that but and actually it’s just a stupid TV show and none of them stay married and I wasn’t going to propose. I just thought you should know because it was important and maybe it would have been different if The King hadn’t died the next day.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe that gave me something bigger to hurt about.

  You looked beautiful in that photo on the Internet.

  You used to not look quite as good. At least not, public consumption good. But then again, you also used to think about things that matter. The world. The orphans in Nepal. The elephants being tortured. The way that people stopped connecting and started staring at their phones instead. The way AIDS is still a thing even though it gets less press. The women in the Congo. The sharks.

  You cared about everything.

  Do you even remember?

  Now, I guess, you’re another famous face.

  How did it happen so fast? That’s what I want to know. It makes me feel kind of crazy, how quick you became someone else.

  I guess I did, too.

  But The King wins if it’s a contest because he became dead.

  That’s the most profound transformation. You’re only first runner-up.

  I’m nothing.

  I saw an interview with you on some stupid website. They called you an up-and-comer, but they didn’t say in what. “The scene”? What does that even mean?

  What scene?

  It sounds like something you would hate.

  Are you even old enough for “the scene”? What do your parents think of that?

  And when did you start drinking in clubs? Was it like the day of the funeral? Did the invites start coming in?

  I mean, seriously, what?

  You know what I think about mostly?

  I think about those finless sharks being thrown over the edges of the boats and the way they flick their tails in a sea of their own blood—that has to be exciting to their senses, all that blood, before they realize it’s their own—the way the nerves in their bodies are sending a message to the place where their tail fins used to be, willing the nonexistent tail fins to move. The phantom tail fins. The way they try a few times before they realize it’s not going to work. That nothing’s going to work. Then they sink.

  They surrender to it.

  I wonder how that feels.

  I get the feeling I know how it feels.

  But you know what? I also think about the other stuff.

  I think about that party we went to at Parrish’s place when his parents were on a cruise and he and his sister decorated the crap out of that apartment. If anyone else did that, we’d think, “Dude, seriously? Are you eight?” But somehow they made those fairy and wizard decorations seem purposeful and awesome, after all.

  I don’t want to

  I mean, this is

  There are over three hundred different species of shark.

>   I am trying to only think about sharks because it’s easier, you know?

  It’s easier than thinking about you. And about how you danced when you put the wings on at that party, the way that you were laughing. It was like a movie, a stupid romantic movie, when you spun around and around and the lights were flashing and for a second we were the only ones in the room and we weren’t just slightly drunk teenagers, we were every age we’d ever been: little kids, big kids, teenager, even our future adult selves, all spinning in that moment.

  Or maybe I was drunker than I thought.

  I wanted to kiss you so bad, like I’d never wanted to kiss anyone before.

  Then The King built that insane tightrope from the top of the stairs over the entrance hall and climbed onto it. Then he pasted on his look-at-me face. And then there was the way everyone stared like he knew they would, hooting and clapping.

  The way, when he was done, you ran over to him and jumped on him, knocking him to the ground. That’s when he grinned for real.

  “Give the people what they want,” he said to me from the floor, staring up, holding you tight around the waist like he’d never let you go. It was the way his hands were there on the bare part of your back above your jeans, the part that made me think of violins and sex.

  I felt sick.

  We had this deal that no one ever said out loud, but the deal was that we were friends, the three of us, and no one could cross the lines of friendship with you. Not me. Not him.

  We had a deal.

  Maybe you didn’t know that. Or maybe you forgot.

  Maybe he didn’t know either.

  So anyway, guess what?

  I’m going to stay with my dad for a while.

  Well, you know what he’s like.

  So really looking forward to that.

  By which I mean, I’d rather do anything else. I’d say that I’d rather die, but that would be a lie and something that I’m actually not going to say again because it’s not funny anymore. Not ever. No matter who says it.

  Anyway, no matter how much I think about them, those finned sharks can’t be saved. Even if you were right there and caught them in your hands and held them up, they’d die anyway. They’d bleed out. You can’t put a Band-Aid on a shark.

  There’s a lot of stuff you can’t put a Band-Aid on.

  I love you.

  I hate you.

  Whatever, right?

  Smell ya later. Catch ya on the flip side. Love ya.

  JC

  7

  I need to say that she’s totally hilarious.

  And smart.

  She is so smart.

  She reads everything, just because. She read the encyclopedias up until the letter M and then she says it got repetitive and it felt like the earlier letters, the things she knew about, say, Alexandria, were leaking out to make room for Mars.

  She took a night class at some old-person community center about Ancient Greece because she thought it looked “fun” but no one else signed up so it got canceled so she took knitting instead and made me a sweater with sleeves so long that I could put my legs in them and wear it like pants.

  When she’s tired, her left eye totally droops. When she sees that squint in pictures she posts them, tagged #DirtyOldManWink. She has a tattoo of a cartoon rabbit on her ankle that looks like a rat until you see the long ears. She can belt out a song like you wouldn’t believe, her voice so gravelly and huge it’ll make you think of big skies filled with stars or sex or the bottom of the sea.

  Sex, mostly though.

  I mean, come on. Seriously.

  She’s beautiful. She’s so beautiful that if you look at her in the light of the biology lab, the sun streaming in and making everything look coated with dust, she’ll look so stupidly beautiful, you’ll think sappy things like, She looks like an angel. And you’ll believe yourself.

  If you aren’t in love with her, there’s something wrong with you.

  But forget it, because she’s saving herself for college. She says high school relationships are doomed to be remembered only when you’re drunk. And when you think of them sober, you’ll cringe and die a little inside, so she doesn’t want to give herself something to regret.

  Sometimes she spits when she’s talking because she gets going so fast the words don’t have a chance to leave the saliva behind and she has that gap between her front teeth. “The spit hole,” she calls it. “Très très sexy.” She once puked on Janet Jackson’s lap at a celebrity wedding they both attended that ended in a pretty famous divorce less than a month later. (Janet said, “That’s okay, sweetie,” and patted her fluffy hair and then sent her parents a bill for three thousand dollars.)

  She totally gets irony. She loves her parents as much as she hates their jobs and money. She knows the Japanese word for when the sun goes through the trees and the German word for being sick of everything in the world.

  She makes these Buddhist sand mandala things for fun on the deck on the roof of her penthouse apartment building and waits for them to blow away in the wind because she says it’s only when they are destroyed that they mean anything.

  Who says stuff like that?

  I thought she knew everything.

  I thought she had the answers.

  I thought she was someone she isn’t.

  As in, not the person she is pretending to be lately, the one who suddenly has a reason to be interviewed. “I’ve always wanted to be an actress,” she says shyly.

  Liar.

  That’s what I say. She never wanted to be an actress. She never wanted to be one of them.

  Or maybe she was just lying to me.

  I don’t get it though. How can one person change so much, so fast?

  Love is another one of those words that has a shape and a taste and a feel and way too much meaning and a bitter aftertaste, like grapefruit or some kind of rare Asian fruit with spines on it that you can only buy in the month of February and even then, only from that one weird little grocery store hidden in the shadows of a building on Twelfth. It’s a word that sweats out of you, looking for a way to get away before anyone can really get hold of it, like a snake or mercury.

  The thing with that prickly rare fruit is that once you’ve bitten it, you can’t stop craving it. You think you’ll go crazy for it, waiting for it to come back to you again.

  I only kissed her once and it was an accident, that’s what she said after. She’s not totally wrong. I mean, sometimes when you stand too close to someone and their face is there, you have no real choice but to kiss it and anyway, you’ve had a beer and she smells good and you don’t know that just letting your lips fall onto someone else’s will turn into a body count.

  How could you have known?

  You should have known.

  Of course he loved her, too.

  The really stupid part is how much all of you laughed about that dumb show that your mom works on. How you were like, “This is so fake, man. This is so lame.” How none of you really got how real it feels, even if it is all wrong. Even if it’s hidden behind a bunch of crappy production values and thick makeup.

  Right?

  It’s so stupidly human, that’s the thing.

  8

  I come out of the school and into a blast of hot sun an hour after everyone else, which sucks because now it’s rush hour and the 6 train will be a nightmare of body odor and strangers’ sweat dripping into your personal space. My commute takes two hours at this time of day and sometimes I like it because it gives me time to become the person I’m meant to be at the end of it. On hot days at rush hour, though, I’d rather light myself on fire than get onto one of those trains where even the windows are sweating back everyone’s sweat, like a body odor sauna and the air-conditioning doesn’t even begin to make a difference. If spring has been shockingly, unnaturally hot, now that it’s officially summer, it’s incendiary. It takes me a minute to adjust from the ice-cold office to this crazy heat, this oven of unforgivingly still air. It takes me another minu
te to think of where I can go. What I can do so that I don’t leave here until late enough that the crowds will have cooled off, the train will be less of a horror show.

  I don’t know what to do.

  The school is giving me grief counseling. It’s mandatory. I think they’re worried that The King’s death will make me kill myself, like a grisly misguided Romeo-and-Juliet bromance. And while the Obnoxious School for the Overfunded loves to be on the news, they don’t want it to be for some kind of lame suicide epidemic. If I don’t do the counseling, they revoke my scholarship. They are serious about this. I mean, obviously for my own good, etc.

  The counselor, “call me Ah-knee,” is a person who has probably never experienced grief and who thinks I need to expel my negative energy by holding a crystal in my fist and humming one note over and over in a darkened room. It’s so crazy that I want to laugh but I can’t because The King is dead and it isn’t funny because nothing is and at least the school has air-conditioning, which is more than I can say about our apartment. When I go home, I leave behind everything, all the best things like cool, metallic, machine-made air. I lose things like privilege and personal space. I become one of a million hot bodies destined for somewhere else, going back to where we belong, our little cheap boxes somewhere far away from this shiny, rich place.

  I wonder how much “Ah-knee” charges. Where she lives. I bet she has an apartment overlooking the park. I bet the air conditioner blows so hard that her Persian cat’s hair blows back in the cold air. I bet her doorman holds the door extra long for her, his eyes lingering on her aerobically perfect body. I’m human, I noticed. She’s a person who cares what she looks like. She wants you to notice. Every week so far, she has worn a different pair of über expensive-looking shoes and they are always unscuffed, brand-new. They look like they are handmade from the skin of baby peacocks by elderly Italian artisans. They look like they’ve been soled with the hide of an embryonic rhino or a shark who swam into the wrong line at the wrong time. They are so delicate that I want to grab one from her foot, I want to twist it in my hands and feel it being destroyed.

  I hate her for that, for making me feel that way. It feels disgusting. I feel disgusting.